The Shark is Broken is a captivating play about the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded during the much-troubled filming of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1975 movie, Jaws. The play premiered in London’s West End in 2021 before coming to Toronto, then Broadway this past fall.
The setting for The Shark is Broken is entirely aboard the Orca, the small fishing boat on which the entire third act of Spielberg’s movie occurs. In the Broadway version I saw not long ago, New York stage actor Colin Donnell played the part of Hollywood actor Roy Scheider, who starred as Chief Brody, the sheriff of Amity Island in Spielberg’s film. Alex Brightman plays a young Richard Dreyfuss, who starred as Matt Hooper, an oceanographer who comes to Amity to study the island’s recent shark attacks. And finally, Ian Shaw, who also co-wrote the play, takes on the role of his own father, Robert Shaw, who starred as Quint, the grizzled shark-hunter and captain of the Orca in the movie.
The play opens in 1974 on location on the Orca floating off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard with the filming of Jaws already in its eighth laborious week. From the very first scene, it’s clear much has gone wrong. The skill of the movie’s director, the 27-year old Spielberg, is in question. The script is a mess, requiring new rewrites daily. Weather is a problem. The tides are a problem. Tourists in sailboats ruining the shots are a problem. Shaw, Dreyfuss, and Scheider are not only certain the movie is going to be a box office disaster, they’re worried it may sink their careers entirely. They’re not even sure what the film is really about other than there’s a shark involved.
Very different in temperament but in a way that compellingly reflects the characters they’re playing in the movie itself, the trio are openly clashing. Shaw’s an alcoholic, visibly drunk on set during the insufferable delays. Dreyfuss is comically insecure. And Scheider, mostly level-headed as he mediates the arguments between his co-stars, is at the same time overly concerned about his suntan. But what’s most vexing of all is that Bruce, the 26-foot long mechanical shark crucial to making the movie, is always broken. With the story’s villain in dry-dock, corroded by Atlantic saltwater, no one knows if the film will ever be finished at all.
It all makes for a great evening at the theater. Watching Shaw play his late father onstage is moving, and there’s a certain satisfaction for the audience in knowing they’ll find a way through it all, such that Jaws will become both a remarkable box office and critical success.
It’s now a part of movie lore that Bruce’s glitchy nature forced Spielberg to shoot a number of scenes without a shark, instead utilizing composer John Williams’ iconic score as the predator’s effective stand-in. That’s sort of true, but not completely. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Spielberg said of the movie’s memorable opening in which the killer shark is never actually seen, “I thought it would be very scary not to show it at all. If the shark had come out of the water, it would have been spectacular but there would’ve been nothing primal about it—it would’ve just been another monster moment all of us had already seen…I wanted it…to trigger our imagination about what was going on below. I felt that was stronger than showing the snout or even a glimpse of fin.”
Whether it was forced upon him because of the machinery, as the legend says and Shaw’s play implies, or due to Spielberg’s brilliant instincts—there might be a lesson in this for us, especially as the tasks and burdens we sometimes place upon ourselves at Christmas time draw so near that we might be hearing a version of Williams’ Jaws score in the background.
The lesson? Sometimes we have an ideal in our minds about what ought to happen, how events must unfold. We think everything must be just so as it all plays out—but then inevitably, it doesn’t. It doesn’t come together as planned. It doesn’t pan out as we’d pictured or hoped. Maybe something breaks. Something goes off-script. Maybe people aren’t getting along, and it all begins to feel like a disaster movie.
Maybe it’s not, though. Instead, let what is unspooling before your eyes trigger your imagination. Maybe less is more. Maybe it’s time for a rewrite. One that proves more interesting and memorable than the thing you’ve already experienced so many times before. And in finding this different way forward—maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a better way through.
God—When things break down, show me a better way through. Amen.
